Transforming Demand Response using Open ADR 3.0

Demand Response (DR) is transitioning from traditional event-based DR to continuous demand flexibility (DF). This transformation is bringing about changes in several dimensions of building-grid interaction: from static DR events on a few days per year to continuous flexibility every hour of every day, from a few customers who sign up for DR programs to all utility customers, and from a few devices such as a smart thermostat to all customer devices. This shift can also lead to a major part of the system load becoming “flexible”. With this, expensive and cumbersome building-grid integration processes are detrimental to achieving climate and electric utility resilience goals. Scalable DR solutions are needed that are continuous and ubiquitous and that facilitate new capabilities to customers and the grid, such as inexpensive microgrid operation and maximizing the benefits from all grid resources. 

Central to making this work is a simple coordination model—price and capacity—both inside the customer site and at the customer/grid interface. Also critical is a universal mechanism for communicating this information—for all contexts and scales; with its release in late 2023, the mechanism that best achieves these goals is OpenADR 3.0. This paper will present a system architecture that enables this transformation and explain how all of the above dimensions are facilitated by OpenADR 3.0. It will also describe the nature of the implementation details to incorporate OpenADR 3.0 functionality into building loads, through building gateways, and other devices. Finally, it describes a sample implementation that demonstrates how it can easily be implemented and integrated.